鋼の錬金術師 1 🦾 (IMC) - Week 2

鋼の錬金術師 1 :mechanical_arm:

Intermediate Manga Club
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Week 2 10 August 2024
Chapter 1 part 2
Start page 38
End page 57
Pages 19
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Next week Week 3
Home Thread 鋼の錬金術師

Vocabulary

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We meet 汝 again his week!

On p. 49.

But this time it’s vulgar うぬ - “blockhead!; you​” :smile:

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Read up to page 47 so far. I found the first few pages quite tricky with lots of speech from コーネロ, but the rest haven’t been so bad.

p44

Just want to double check my understand of くれる a little. In this sentence:
あの人を甦らせてはくれないのですか?
Does this have the meaning of “for me”?
So like, Are you not able to resurrect that person for me?

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p.44

Yes, you’re correct about it having the meaning of “for me”. But the 甦らせて is not in potential form, so she’s not asking if he’s unable to do it, but more like, “Are you not going to resurrect that person for me?”

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Reading this triggered a memory about something I had (literally) stored away

Fun fact: I don’t think I ever touched the first 10 volumes of this because I had already read it

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p.44

Ah, thank you for the clarification, seems I’m still mixing up my potential and causative forms a little, will have to keep an eye on that.
Thanks again :slight_smile:

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p.44

Well that was beautiful: the kanji 甦 is 更 (again) + 生 (life) which gives the verb 甦る
(as for the reading よみがえる I can’t see the beauty in it but I’m sure it’s there. よみ + かえる? read again? :thinking:)

p.47

What’s HIRAKE GOMA?

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Open sesame (Literally.)

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Reply

Oooh thank you so much.
Now that I see the wiki page, I feel like I’ve seen it before but can’t find it in manga that I’ve read, maybe it was in Satori Reader…

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Found it!

Episode 35 of Oku Nikkou

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p44

Not spelling it 蘇る to flex on the gaijin. Fair, fair…

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Ha! I went through the same rabbit hole a while ago, it’s in fact unrelated to 読み:

From the classical yodan katsuyō verb yomigaheru, itself derived from 黄泉 (yomi, “land of the dead, underworld”) + 帰る (kaeru, “to return”). The kaeru changes to gaeru as an instance of rendaku (連濁).

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I thought that way before, but now I think it is more possibly (and cooly) 黄泉(よみ) + (かえ)る, return from hell.

Pitch accents also work that way.

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Now the question becomes “why is the underworld called the yellow fountain”:

From Old Japanese, first attested in the Kojiki, the oldest extant historical record of ancient Japan, compiled in 712 CE. Appears to be the older combining form of yomi (see below).

The ablaut or apophonic form of cognate 山 (yama, “mountain”). Mountains were often used as a place to bury the dead and were strongly associated with the afterlife. (Can this etymology be sourced?)

Orthographic borrowing from Chinese 黃泉/黄泉 (huángquán, literally “yellow springs”), incorporating the underworld from Chinese mythology.

Apparently in Chinese 黄泉 means underground spring and thence came to mean “underworld” figuratively.

I like the hypothetical 山/黄泉 connection.

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Nice founds @simias and @polv :smiley:

Didn’t realize it but I did see this word before in an a VN: それとも……黄泉の国から蘇ってきた死者か
Can’t see an obvious reason why this kanji has these radicals! Probably maybe fish and grain are buried under some grass…

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Yeah I only discovered the 甦 spelling today but it’s certainly a lot nicer than the more common 蘇. I don’t fully understand why 蘇 came to mean this given that the primary meaning is “perilla” (a plant). Apparently it has both meanings in Chinese too.

Maybe it’s just one of these cases where some ancient scribe couldn’t be bothered to remember 甦 and decided to borrow 蘇 phonetically to mean both, although that seems like a strength given the relative complexity of both kanji. Or maybe the perilla was somehow connected to “revival”.

I found this explanation online:

「蘇」は、植物を表す「艸(くさかんむり)」と「禾(イネ科の植物)」に、動物である「魚」を組み合わせた会意文字で、相容れないもの同士を一つの文字にして、関係がない、はなれている、隙間(すきま)のある植物という意味を表していました。

やがて、この意味から転じて、喉の隙間が空いて窒息していた息が通ることを表すようになり、上記のような意味を持つようになったのです。

There’s no source however and it sounds a bit like folk etymology to me.

Interestingly according to this same page 蘇る would actually be the preferred spelling in the context on the manga:

しかし、上記の各漢字の成り立ちの違いなどから、一般的には次のような使い分けがされているようです。

  • 「蘇」を使う場合:死者が息を吹き返す、蘇生する場合など
  • 「甦」を使う場合:勢いの衰えたものや古くなったものがバージョンアップして勢いを取り戻すような場合など
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This alchemist is not fullmetal, it’s like halfmetal at most. Admittedly it’s the English title that oversells it.

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p.41

What does 切り取りにかかる mean in this line from コーネロ: 「あと数年の後に私はこの国を切り取りにかかるぞ!」
What is the function of にかかる if 切り取り means cutting off?

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I don’t know either, I tend to just ignore かかる and use context cues to get the meaning because this bloody verb has about ten thousands uses and spellings and at this point it lost all meaning to me.

Just loading かかる in yomitan and then scrolling gives me a panic attack.

Also I don’t think 切り取り means “cut off” here, but more like “plunder” or maybe “seize”: 「切り取る」の意味や使い方 わかりやすく解説 Weblio辞書

武力で領地などを奪い取る。

Maybe かかる here just means “to start” or “to get going”, so here it could mean “after a few years I’ll get to plundering this country”. I don’t think that sounds very good in English but that’s as close I can get to the way I parse this nihongese sentence.

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Artist's rendering of that one time simias read through Yomitan's entry for かかる

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